PLEASE START US OFF BY INTRODUCING YOURSELF:
Twice Different is a Melbourne based indie game studio that makes dark genre-hybrid strategy games. We want our games to be experiences people haven't played before, with challenging yet accessible mechanics.
TELL US ABOUT WINNIE'S HOLE
We're currently working on Winnie's Hole, a game about being a symbiotic virus in Winnie.
Spread the virus to capture cells in his body which mutate and evolve your host, as you adventure through a dark reimagining of the classic Winnie world inspired by Brother's Grimm fairy tales and Nickelodeon cartoons.
We often start with game mechanics and knew we wanted to make a game about building a monster, which is played by building. We'd been prototyping mechanics for months without really finding a direction that was working... It seemed like a good direction would be playing as a virus, and we had this block placement minigame which felt kind of interesting. Eventually we took a break from making this more serious virus growing game to do a gamejam with the classic Winnie content, which had entered public domain that year.
We tried combining these ideas and Winnie turned out to be a great comedic contrast to a virus, and the simpler art style worked really well with the way we'd set up mutations. The goal of a virus is to survive and propagate, and a symbiotic virus will benefit its host. Winnie, being a bit clumsy and naive, doesn't even really understand he's infected at first so the situational comedy became really fun to write for and the project kept growing from there.
HOW HAS THE DEVELOPMENT JOURNEY BEEN
The journey's been long and meandering. Whenever you try to innovate on game mechanics it can take a long time for different facets of the game design to become cohesive. We've prototyped dozens of combat systems along the way and been working on it for about 2 years now.
WHICH GAME ENGINE DID YOU CHOOSE AND WHY?
We're working in Unity for this project as our team is very familiar with it.
WHAT'S BEEN YOUR BIGGEST DEVELOPMENT HURDLE SO FAR?
The biggest hurdle for me personally when making rogue lite strategy games is you need to have a critical mass of content to even validate whether your gameplay is going to be fun. A lot of the interest comes from build crafting and combining mechanics in different ways, along with discovering the world you're in. To make a rich and engaging world generally needs a lot of content and takes much longer than expected!
ADVICE FOR FELLOW DEVS?
Making games is a huge undertaking and the advice is very different depending on where you are in your journey.
One thing which is very important to be able to finish and release your game is scope and feasibility.
When deciding what to make, think about what you CAN make, and cater the scope of the project to skills in your team.
ANY FINAL THOUGHTS?
Thanks for the interview!
If anyone would like to follow what we're doing or get involved in our events or playtesting feel free to join our Discord! We want to give players a new challenge with our games and hope you enjoy them!
-Twice Different
❤️
